Keeping Cool!

As you are no doubt aware, north Texas is in its "head in the oven on high heat" season we have every year. This year, it seems to have arrived a little earlier than most years. The weather forecast is the same each day - temps near 100 with no clouds to break the unrelenting sun bearing down on all who are unfortunate enough to be outdoors. Well, Monday our solar screens arrived! We ordered these screens for all the windows across the front of the house (the house faces west/southwest) as well as around the northwest corner of the house. Here some of the screens are laid out on the grass in preparation for installation.


The screens are simply placed over the exterior of the windows (at least, with the window types we have) and are attached with self-tapping sheet metal screws.

Purely for aesthetics sake, we even ordered screens for these three "windows" which have attic space behind them.

Two men did the job quickly. Our house was the 2nd on their list of installs this day. They had just come from another install of 42 screens on a home! Our job was a breeze compared to that!

Lone Star Solar Screens was the company we chose. We used them ~10 years ago on our previous home as well - and they held up very nicely the first time, so we are a repeat customer...

Here is the finished product. Notice the "grids" put on all the windows which can be seen from the street. They match up exactly where the grids are located on the windows they cover.

Looking at the northwest corner of the house. Behind the fence are two bathroom windows which we also had screened, as they catch the late afternoon sun.

It is hard to describe how much difference these screens make. It may not make a whale of a lot of difference in the A/C bill month to month, but it does make a VAST difference in the comfort of a room protected by these screens. If you have windows which take the brunt of the afternoon sun, we highly recommend them!

Tom